text goes here text goes here text goes here text goes here text goes here text goes here text goes here text goes here text goes here text goes here

Wordspace - this section currently under development

We are all familiar with those puzzles where you have to find paths between words by changing one letter at a time. For example SHIP to PORT: one path would be SHIP – SHOP – SHOT – SOOT – SORT – PORT.

Wordspace was a little project that combined my love of words with my love of graph theory. For the uninitiated, a "graph" in this sense is nothing to do with bar charts and the like, it's a network of objects (words, in this case) and lines joining them. The space I explored was defined by the then official international Scrabble dictionary CSW07, which contained 267,750 words of the English language between two and 15 letters in length. I defined two words to connected if you could get from one to the other by changing a single letter. For some explorations I limited the study to words of the same length and for others I traversed the entire space by allowing letters to be added or removed.

Some of what I discovered was surprising to me and much of it was delightful to words lovers. Here's one of the smaller, self-contained graphs of seven-letter words. Mouse over the picture for detail. Can you work out what the coloured lines mean?

If you are delighted by words, read on...

text goes here text goes here text goes here text goes here text goes here text goes here text goes here text goes here text goes here text goes here